Is this really my life?
Posted on December 05, 2023 by Janet Fisher, MA, ACC, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.
How to understand, accept, reframe, and take action when life doesn’t go the way you want.
I hear this question a lot when I am coaching and have asked myself the same one as well. One of the biggest challenges in life is dealing with our lives not going the way we think they should go and it’s often in more than one area. It can be so frustrating and upsetting because our vision of what our life was supposed to be isn’t occurring.
This can be in all sorts of ways, but the main ones seem to be with finances, relationships, and health. Many of us were raised to be good people, go to college, get married, buy a house, and have a great job. It sounds so simple, right? Well, this “plan” can be very challenging especially as time goes on. Perhaps our life partner does not appear, or our marriage doesn’t work out. Sometimes a career or business is a struggle, so finances become a huge problem. Or maybe we battle with our health be it with weight issues, addiction, or a debilitating accident. Is this really my life? This is not what I thought it would be. What a bad feeling to not be living the life you want even though you tried to do everything right. Now what?
Here are three tips that may help:
1. Awareness of the discrepancy: Become aware of the discrepancy between what the vision you thought your life was supposed to be and what your life is. It helps to write it down or speak to someone about it like a friend or coach. What was your dream, what’s not in alignment with that now and how did this happen?
2. Reframing the experience: How do you not be the victim or focus on the negative? Some things you caused yourself like being fifty pounds overweight and others were bad luck like getting cancer. From here, what can you control or do to change the situation? You could take the steps to lose weight which would connect to how you thought you would look and feel. If there is a situation like a divorce, then that’s almost impossible to just “fix” it so the goal here is to work on changing your mindset about it. I coached someone who was going through a terrible divorce, and she kept saying “I can’t believe this is my life now” and my response was how can you change your life now to make it happier to try and reframe it? She responded that she had to accept that she was really getting divorced but that it gave her an opportunity to have a more fulfilling relationship with someone else and build a new life. Not easy!
3. Take action: This is a tough part of the process because it’s easier to feel bad and complain about everything that hasn’t worked out, especially if it’s not your fault like losing a job in a bad economy or your child having a serious health issue. Yes, it’s not fair for you to have to go through this and it certainly isn’t what you “signed up for” but what now? How can you make your life better? One of the ways (and science backs this up) is to offer to help someone else with this issue or with something else. I know it seems odd that someone who is suffering could or should be the one to help another in need, but it will improve that person’s mental health. Studies show that people who volunteer are happier, especially after a difficult time. Often our problems don’t seem as bad when we meet and help others in need.
Finally, there may be some positive outcomes to the imperfect life that you ARE living now. Perhaps you are more compassionate to others, more evolved from doing the work to improve the situation and more grateful for the things that have gone well.
Is it possible that someday you might be glad that this really is your life?
